How is that possible for them to know your real age, logically? (I don't mean you're lying, but only you can work out the link with other services and facebook that might be leaking this information).
- Easily deducing my approximate age from my Linkedin profile.
- Any of the numerous other private people data sources they have access to or have bought over the years. I'm sure my birthday and basic details are in some of those. It's impossible to get those all deleted once the information is out.
- Day and month are easy, because everyone wishes me happy birthday in the messages and wall posts. All that's remaining is the year, which could be easily deduced from Linkedin and other third party data sources. - Which I've mostly cleaned up now, until Facebook exposed it all again.
- I had a profile for a few months in 2005 before deleting it. Used a different computer, different location, different email and everything for this new one a decade later, but probably they've connected the identities. Looks like if you ever tell Facebook some private information, it's non-revokably theirs to expose to the world forever.
Facebook invests very heavily in machine learning / AI, and uses it heavily through out their platform. They collect and buy tons of data both on the site and from third parties. This deduction is trivial for them.
The bad part is not so much that they deduced these details about me though, it's that I specifically made it clear that I didn't want any age public, let alone the real age, and they exposed me anyway.
Facebook runs one of the top machine learning research labs in the world. They're among the most clever in this domain, by every possible metric. They've written extensively about how they employ machine learning across their entire product line, and are adding more constantly. They've acquired numerous ML startups and world-class researchers.
https://research.facebook.com/
https://research.facebook.com/researchers/1543934539189348
Respectfully, you're absolutely wrong, and I'm suspicious as to why you'd be intentionally spreading misinformation that they don't use ML/AI to fill in the gaps in their information about their users.
> "We strive to find ways to deliver more engaging content in News Feed, rank search results more accurately, and present the most relevant ads possible."
I think it'd be a pretty poor use of ML and AI to use it to try and guess the gaps in your profile, and then fill them in. Of course I'm sure they try and show you content and adverts based on what they believe your demographic profile might be, but these beliefs are purely internal to the algorithms that make the decisions as to what to publish - they aren't used to populate your public profile.
In fact, Facebook want the profile information to come from you and for it to be as accurate as possible - to help those algorithms. It wouldn't be sensible or useful to just set your profile fields based on guesses, no matter how clever the ML behind it. As I said before, I think people ascribe too much intelligence to the way Facebook handles personal information - it isn't magic.
Actually, the LinkedIn profile is the most likely, people often try these things, signing up and click-thru acknowledging everything without thinking, then never touch the app again. All I'm saying is that often what you think of as external is actually caused by actions you performed and then forgot about, or never really registered in the first place. Although, some of this may well be down to 'Dark Patterns'in the UX, which should really be investigated and changed.
I do have a FB connection to the place, though.
In general, I think most of the 'Facebook/Google have secretly stolen my personal data with intrusive sureveillance' anecdotes really are the result of someone clicking 'yes', 'yes', 'of course' without thinking when they first signed up, and giving access to their email addresss book or similar, then forgetting about it. They then get more privacy concious later, and suddenly wonder how all the information got there. And since they're privacy concious now they couldn't possibly have uploaded it, so it must be Facebook hacking them.
I've yet to see an actual documented and acknowledged example of a company like Facebook or Google doing the sort of intrusive data mining and surveillance that people accuse them of without the user's permission being given. It always turns out to have been provided at some point previously in the relationship.
1.) The Facebook and Google AIs are teaming up and following me and my friends and family around the web to see what we each had for breakfast.
2.) Facebook sort of tricked me into not clicking the button that said I won't not disallow them to keep all my personal information, and link it to my friends data too, if they can.